by Alex Jackson When Chuck Workman juxtaposed Shirley Temple with Adolf Hitler in his underseen 1995 documentary The First 100 Years, he was dramatizing America's suckling on the opium pipe of Temple musicals while Hitler rose to power in Germany. This is reflective of the general attitude towards Temple in the 1940s: not only was she no longer cute, she also embodied a sense of brain-dead frivolousness in American film that the zeitgeist started snuffing out through soppy sentimentality, hardened disillusionment, or some combination of the two. Movies got heavy in the Forties, and Temple could not keep up with them.

by Alex Jackson If The Shining has dated the most of Kubrick's films, Barry Lyndon, which immediately preceded it, has dated the least. In 1976, Barry Lyndon was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award alongside Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, and Nashville. I have some reservations about a couple of those, but there's no arguing that these are a few of the most revered American movies of the last four decades. And yet, they're all inextricably linked to the year 1975. Certainly, they still work on their own terms, but today there's an unspoken contract that we will acknowledge and accept them as something produced thirty-five years ago. We don't have to make any such concessions with Barry Lyndon; there isn't anything vintage about it.

January 17, 2014

by Alex Jackson In that glorious blow-job-thinly-disguised-as-a-documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, director Sydney Pollack claims to remember Pauline Kael's pan of 2001: A Space Odyssey "very well." A decade later, he says, the film was considered a classic--suggesting that Kael was seriously out of touch when she reviewed it, I guess. Pollack fails to mention the punch line, though: in the same piece, a notorious essay called "Trash, Art, and the Movies," Kael exalts Pollack's own The Scalphunters! 2001 is pretty lousy art, she decided, while The Scalphunters is pretty great trash. Between the two, she frankly prefers The Scalphunters.

by Alex Jackson Particularly in light of its 50th Anniversary DVD reissue, which gathers together all three extant versions of the film, I find myself grouping writer-director Orson Welles's Touch of Evil with multiple-incarnated masterworks like Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, and, to a lesser extent, Dawn of the Dead and Brazil. Moreover, I don't quite see it as a 1950s noir thriller from Universal, or even really as an Orson Welles picture--rather, I look at Touch of Evil as a canonical part of every young (male?) cinephile's indoctrination. It occurs to me that you should be able to buy one-sheets for it at your local record store. So I was mildly surprised to hear Jonathan Rosenbaum admit in his audio commentary that he disliked the picture when he saw it as a teenager. He explains that he tied it too closely into the film noir genre and found it an unpleasant specimen. David Edelstein, in his theatrical review of the 1998 restoration, writes that he initially regarded it as one of the worst movies ever made. The picture neatly conformed to his preconceptions of what bad movies are like.

by Alex Jackson The plot is simplicity itself: Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) has just completed his training as an Army Ranger; he goes to a local bar to celebrate with his pregnant wife (Monica Potter), gets assaulted by some thugs, kills one in the ensuing fight, and is convicted of manslaughter. Eight years later, his sentence is up and he hitches a prison flight that happens to be transferring a number of the country's most dangerous and renowned criminals, including Cyrus "the Virus" Grissom (John Malkovich), a brilliant psychopath who murders people just because he can; Nathan "Diamond Dog" Jones (Ving Rhames), a black militant who wrote a book in prison that is now being made into a feature film with Denzel in talks for the lead; William "Billy Bedlam" Bedford (Nick Chinlund), who slayed his wife's parents, brothers, and dog when he discovered the missus in bed with another man; and Johnny 23 (Danny Trejo), a serial rapist with 23 heart tattoos on his arm. ("One for each of my bitches," he explains.) Cyrus leads a revolt on the plane, killing or capturing all of the guards and hijacking the flight. But like Alan Rickman in Die Hard, Tommy Lee Jones in Under Siege, or Powers Boothe in Sudden Death, he has no idea that one of the hostages he's holding is a classically-trained ass-kicker!

October 25, 2013

by Alex Jackson I know it's loony, but I watched "Mystery
Science Theater 3000" (or "MST3K") mostly for the movies. Oh, I liked
the jokes. There were some episodes I laughed so hard at I had to turn
off the television because I couldn't breathe. But I saw the riffing as
a bonus, a way to make a good thing better. I didn't really watch the
show just because it was funny, and its ironic appreciation of "bad
movies" didn't strike me as all that different from the sincere
appreciation I had for the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space
as a child. In fact, I don't think it's all that different from the
deeper appreciation I have for those movies today. Mocking them doesn't
necessarily detract from them. Their sensually visceral aspect always
shines through. You can easily tell if something is any good regardless
of who is talking over it. Besides, there's something amiably homey and
relaxed about the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" approach. If you like
a film, you should be able to enjoy it on your sofa. You should be able
to converse about it in the moment. And you should even be able to
laugh at it. If you can only love something with reverence, I'm not
sure that's love.

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN
EFFECT. I confess to feeling a little insecure while reading the entry
for Chandu the Magician in Leonard
Maltin's Movie & Video Guide, wherein the learned
film historian derides Chandu as "disappointing"
and "not as good as most serials in this genre, and even sillier." The
suggestion is that he's wholly sympathetic to the material and was
actually hoping to see a good movie before being "disappointed." Mr.
Maltin may very well be in a better position than me to determine the
relative merits of Chandu the Magician. Speaking as
a layman, I found it to be sublime pulp fiction. Prototypical of George
Lucas's Indiana Jones and Star Wars
franchises, the film is remarkably shameless in its goofiness, never
veering into self-deprecation or camp. It's one of those rare pop
entertainments that genuinely make you feel like a kid again.

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Well, it starts
off beautifully. The camera is floating around a parking lot while the
Eartha Kitt version of "Santa Baby" plays on the soundtrack. The choice
of this song is reminiscent of the semi-ironic use of "Mr. Sandman" at
the end of Rick Rosenthal's pretty-damn-good Halloween II.
It casts the madman who will chase our heroine in the role of a dream
lover born of her subconscious death wish. Then the camera stops on a
column with this level of the parking lot, P2, painted on it. The sign
is flanked by the names of our leads, Rachel Nichols and Wes Bentley.
Pretty cool way of presenting the film's title.

by Alex Jackson Ebony
and ivory are living in perfect harmony in 1984's Breakin'.
This is hardly a "white" movie, but it's not really a "black" one,
either. It actually seems that Breakin' is
genuinely multicultural: The film doesn't neutralize or marginalize
blackness--in fact, it quite certainly celebrates it. But it's not
black at the expense of excluding white faces. Instead of aligning
itself with one particular racial identity, Breakin'
aligns itself with a conglomerate of all of them. This is a party to
which everyone is invited.

September 28, 2013

by Alex Jackson I understand on an intellectual level what Student
Bodies is trying to do, and I admire its verve and, at times,
even its wit. But it just isn't funny. The film, a 1981 spoof of
slasher movies, lands with an audible wet plop. There are a few laughs,
but a spoof movie needs to be chockablock with laughs if it is ever
going to work at all. When joke after joke fails to produce the
intended response, we don't have anything left to hang onto--and the
experience becomes nothing short of excruciating. I wouldn't mind going
the rest of my life never seeing another one of these movies. I think
I've basically outgrown them and now demand a little bit of a challenge
even from mindless escapist entertainment. Once you see enough of these
comedies being done badly, you realize that you have more to lose than
you do to gain from investing those eighty minutes.

September 24, 2013

by Alex Jackson Shirley Lyner (Katherine Waterston) is not
only anxious about getting into the right college, she's worried about
how she's going to pay for it, too. Unlikely inspiration hits after she
babysits for Michael and Gail Beltran (John Leguizamo and Cynthia
Nixon). While driving her home, Michael takes Shirley to a diner for
coffee and they begin to talk. When Michael first met his wife, she was
a boldly sexual "party girl," and he misses that spark. He asks if
Shirley has a boyfriend and she says "no." An outburst from a nearby
group of teenage boys provides a hint as to the reason, likewise an
obsessive-compulsive tic whereby Shirley reorganizes the condiments on
the counter. She doesn't seem to view herself as very sexy or lovable;
since school has always taken precedence over boys for her, she is
rather flattered by the attention Michael is showing her. They have
sex. Terrified to confront his infidelity and his exploitation of this
young girl, Michael generously tips Shirley, shyly reminding her that
he has a wife and kids. This gives Shirley a great idea: she'll recruit
her friends to prostitute themselves out to middle-aged men from around
the neighbourhood.

by Alex Jackson I don't think that
there is any getting around the fact that any true connoisseur of trash
cinema has to see Rodney Amateau's The Garbage Pail Kids Movie.
This was, after all, the feature film debut of Mackenzie Astin, a.k.a.
the horny kid from "The Facts of Life", and of Spanish soap star Katie
Barbieri. Just as the picture marked the start of a career for some, it
marked the end of a career for others. The presence of child star,
singer, and Joan Collins's bitchy ex-husband Anthony Newley is a chief
selling point in the film's trailer, but he was on his way out. And The
Garbage Pail Kids Movie was the last feature from television
director Amateau, who seems to have viewed it as his own personal Fanny
and Alexander, taking on writing and producing chores in
addition to casting other Amateaus (J.P. and Chloe) in minor roles.

July 18, 2013

by Alex Jackson James Guardino's Porn
King is a sterling example of how not to make a documentary.
It fails on every conceivable level--I seriously cannot imagine any
possible way to justify this movie. Above all I feel a real anger
towards Guardino: he's wasting my time. He has nothing to say and no
passion for the medium; he treats this film like a glorified lottery
ticket to the big leagues. My beef with most documentaries is that
they're all steak and no sizzle. They have a subject but no particular
opinion on it and have little desire to realize it cinematically.
That's considered a virtue in some corners. Many believe that
information should be unaffected and vanilla--objective. The thing
about objectivity, though, is that it subjugates the author, clouding
him in anonymity and making him and his film invulnerable to critique.
I end up writing the same thing about almost every documentary I
review, because otherwise I would be forced to discuss the subject
matter exclusively, and a film's subject matter should never be the
sole criterion by which to judge its quality.

July 3, 2013

by Alex Jackson For most of us Americans, our view of
the pre-civil rights movement South has focused more on the sun than on
the storm. While Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks are an
established part of our cultural history, the lynching of Emmett Louis
Till has more or less floundered in relative obscurity despite being
just as if not more essential to racial progress. We understand, in a
perfunctory way, that those who led the civil rights movement were
heroes, but our understanding of what they were fighting against is
diffused and vague. So... Martin Luther King, Jr. made it so that
blacks could sit at the front of the bus and use the same water
fountains as whites? That is essentially all that this period of
history has come to mean in a society that believes children should be
protected from the uglier facts of history at the cost of retaining an
ignorance of a backyard holocaust. The greatest achievement of The
Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, perhaps its only real
achievement, is that it provides some sort of visual record of this
time and place. The film works on the most primitive level of
documentary cinema: it educates you about something important that has
otherwise been grossly underexposed.

by Alex Jackson The
first thing I
did when I got a FACEBOOK ccount was look up Travis, my best friend
from gradeschool, whom I hadn't seen or heard from in the last twenty
years. Looking at his profile, I saw that he listed "extensive" under
music and "way too many to list here" for books, but under movies he
had just one title: The Boondock Saints. The bands
and books he loves are too numerous to mention, but there is a film
that, in his mind, towers above all others. There is only one film that
bears mentioning. And that film is Troy Duffy's The Boondock
Saints. Is it petty of me to not put in that "friend"
request? This seems to be all the update I need. Twenty years is a long
time. The only things we really had in common were that we both went to
the same school and both liked Nintendo and The Monster Squad.
That's hardly enough to inoculate a friendship against The
Boondock Saints.